Sherilee Gray, $2.99
Contemporary Romance, 2017
Heh, Wild Man is a sequel to Mountain Man, in the sense that the heroes of both stories are twin brothers, but the wild man in question is far more eloquent than the mountain man. Maybe the wild thing describes his bedroom abilities, to which I can only nod enthusiastically and say, “Si! Si! Sexy!”
Seriously, I am starting to see a pattern in both the two stories in this The Smith Brothers series: come for the dude on the cover—I don’t mean it that way, okay—and stay for the hot scenes.
Okay, the story. Freya, our heroine, is in love with Beau Smith. They have never met in person, only through online correspondences and phone calls after they met in an online dating site, and now she is, like Roy Orbison would say, driving all night to see him, to wake him from his sleep, to make love to him. Okay, things aren’t going as planned, firstly because the path leading to Beau’s house in the wilderness is rocky and bumpy, and our heroine is soon doing an impersonation of a really bad F1 driver. It’s the culmination of a really bad week, which saw her quitting her job, getting out of a bad relationship, ditching a terrible roommate, and losing a pet hamster. She then staggers for who knows how long along the path until she nearly gets shot by Beau.
Yes, this one is fundamentally the same story as the previous one, with a messy broad falling into the hero’s arms gratefully only to wrap her legs around his waist to… er, right, the story. Beau doesn’t believe in love, so Freya wails about how she has already fallen in love with him, and the whole thing is pretty boring as I’ve read such a thing so many things before.
I’m okay, though, because I’m definitely alright with the love scenes. The author wisely brings on the heat to a degree that can make me match, or at least try to, the late Mr Orbison’s glorious high note during the climax of that song while doing my best impersonation of Priyanka on Canada’s Drag Race. It’s not just the things these characters are doing on the pages, it’s also the intimate fantasy of being in that wonderful, isolated paradise with this hot mountain man that you can just do anything to and with.
Just like with the previous story, I am not sure whether I buy the romance here. If anything, Freya comes off as too needy and just too down on her luck, and her thing with Beau feels more like something a woman could do with to shag away the blues in her life. I definitely approve of this, mind you, and I wish that Beau and his brother can somehow be packaged and distributed to everyone in this world that needs a good boink to feel better about themselves. As a romance, though, Wild Man could use a few more chapters of these characters working out their feelings some more before I can buy that they are truly connected in ways aside from the tab-in-slot method.
Still, I can’t complain. I read this one expecting something sexy, and I get that in spades and waves and crests and… you know, I’m alright with this one. I’m not wild, but I’m perfectly content with how I’ve spent my $2.99.
